Simple way to create Scala scripts

This post is a description of a small project idea developed by a friend of mine: Przemysław Pokrywka, I’m just writing down the idea as a blog post.

There are many ways one can execute Scala code, most people use sbt to create a some kind of build, for example fat jar or something similar or just sbt-native-packager to build the application in more native formats.

But what options do you have in case you want to write Scala scripts?

You can use the scala command to execute something, for example like this:

This is quite useful when you are using only the standard library, but when your script requires more dependencies you have to figure out how to properly manage them, and very quickly this becomes troublesome

You can achieve similar results by using Ammonite, especially with the “Scala Scripts” extensions. I find this a little bit troublesome, especially because it makes it harder to edit files inside IDE.

Ammonite uses caching mechanism to prevent unnecessary recompilation, also we are saving evertyhing after object script into the temporary file

Line 26

CLASSPATH="$($cr/cr fetch -q -p ${dependencies[*]} )" \

This is where the magic happens: The cr fetch command downloads all dependencies (if they were not downloaded before) listed in the previously defined Bash array. The output of the command is a list of those JARs, this output is captured in the CLASSPATH variable, which we’ll be using in the next step.

Lines 27-31

java \
-Dplay.crypto.secret=foo.bar.baz \
-Dconfig.resource=reference.conf \
ammonite.repl.Main $just_scala_file # hide Bash part from Ammonite
# and make it run the Scala part

We are executing straightforward Java process (with CLASSPATH from the previous step), we are starting Ammonite REPL feeding it the scala part of the script

Line 33

exit $?

This prevents Bash from processing the rest of the file.

Lines 36-57

This is the actual Scala code that we are running.

Applications

The most immediate application for a script like that is some sort of a quick start guide where by just running one Bash command you can run some Scala code or setup environment for development.

Also it should be suitable for running more advanced Scala CLI scripts that fetch multiple dependencies and the scripts are not intended to be used for a long time (if you happen to have that scenario, you might be better of by generating a fat jar)